Tag: Job 38

April 8, 2014 / / Essays

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

– G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

One of the primary reason that Christians often don’t like video games, or won’t even entertain buying one, comes down to one simple idea: God designed us to live a real life, not a fake one. An understandable goal, of course; nobody wants to see any Christian sitting in a room all day playing a video game, right? That’s not very Christian in the opinion of many. A relationship with God Himself should take precedence over all else.

I understand this opinion, and confronted it for many years, and in a way I am still haunted by it. No, not THAT question: should I play video games? Rather, this question: are video games just more exciting than real life? Does that mean real life is, gasp, boring? Maybe they just don’t want us to see it when we play video games? Not necessarily! But let’s contrast them both and see what develops.

February 28, 2014 / / Essays

Editor’s Note: Think of these as preliminary thoughts. I wouldn’t call them “fully formed” yet, just a thought experiment of sorts about stories in video games.

I had thought, for a long time, that I was the player character. I controlled his/her/its thoughts, movements, and actions within the game world. Zachery Oliver fundamentally determine what happens onscreen in a narrative of his own making. While thinking this, I did not realize how many loaded assumptions play into the process of that thought, consciously or not.

No one denies, of course, that people create stories. That plays into human personality and actions for generations. People pass tales, myths, and narrative about communities, individuals, and gods throughout time and space. Part of our design shapes our life, psychologically speaking, in the form of a story with each particular instance turning into its own dramatic arc. We use this example from pop culture and sports (just watch Sportscenter, and see them recast every games as a narrative of some sort) to religious devotion (i.e., “God has a plan for my life”). In all cases it shows our brains turning a series of happenings into some intelligible.